Well then why did you bring tea sandwiches? Who would have ever thought that wonder bread, mayonnaise and cucumbers could be so good? Had Tom Robbins only thought of cucumbers, villa incognito would have been more attractive.

And hey, who wants to hang out with a bunch of men anyway? You out to keep promises now, are you?

I, myself am thinking of organizing a million mule march: Stand in the Crap: A Sacred Ass-embly.

[quote="Countess"]
We ought to think of genes like recipes (rather than blueprints). If we were looking at a cake, would you ask the baker: â€œWhat shapes this cake more -- the recipe or the ingredients?â€

Sorry it has been a while since I have posted anything. I have been grading midterms.

I wanted to cite my source. This is the textbook we are using for the class I am teaching. Below is a link to the publisher's site. You can get one chapter on the Evolution of Cooperation for free. You can also purchase an ebook for half the price of the paperback copy.

During the Mesozoic era (the latter years of the dinosaurs) a revolutionary change occured in the plant world that created new ecological niches. Angiosperms evolved. These are plants with showy flowers, sugary nectars, and nutritious, easily digestible fruits. These adaptations evolved to attract pollinators to facilitate sexual reproduction and animals that could disperse their seeds. Birds, insects, and mammals evolved to take advantages of these new ecological niches. These kinds of animals become more diverse and successful as time passed.

I think this is the most fascinating thing I learned while teaching this course. We know that there was a time before fruit and flowers, when plants had only traits that attempted to thwart hungry animals -- thorns, toxins and so forth -- to keep them from eating their precious leaves. After the angiosperms evolved, plants displayed traits that actually attracted the animals to them. The plants now take advantage of the animals' gift of mobility and the animals now take advantage of the plants' gift of nutrition. The plants and animals coevolved. It was revolutionary and it lead directly to the proliferation of mammals that we see in the world today.

Countess

...counting burners with the Black Rock Census and documenting burner culture for the history books

could you explain pheromone attraction, and is it the basis for mating selection and hence offspring coding?

does this natural scent lure work to produce good relationships and /or vibrant progeny or does it make for good sex but not necessarily a good and / or monogamous union.

why do we seek out those we sub-consciously perceive to "smell right" and avoid those that dont?

i have personally found that cops smell funny, but thats an aside, and has no basis in scientific proof. I do know that the human sense of smell is very powerful and effects us in many ways, behavioral and otherwise.

Could the fairly recent development of "Anti-scent" chemicals and devices confused our natural selection process and blurred the mind into thinking we've made the right choice about someone when actually it was estee lauder? Should we be sniffing each others pits before making a commitment?

Simon of the Playa wrote:why do we seek out those we sub-consciously perceive to "smell right" and avoid those that dont?

We are actually very stinky apes. Other animals have a stronger sense of smell, but since we don't have this skill, we produce a lot of odor so that we can communicate information through olfaction.

One of the things that we communicate about ourselves is referred to as our major histocompatibility complex (MHC) . Products of our MHC are involved in immune recognition -- the way that our bodies recognize what is and is not a part of ourselves. Cells in our bodies produce a kind of password that says -- hey this is a part of me. When the password is not present, the body will assume that the cell is an unwanted invader and will attempt to kill it. When we mate, we our offspring get a new password based on the parent's two MHC profiles. Novel passwords are better than old passwords. The more dissimilar the parent's MHCs from one another, the better for the offspring -- who will be better protected from invading pathogens who are not familiar with this novel password. If you mate with someone with a very similar MHC profile as yourself, then your offspring with be at a disadvantage.

We learn about the ways that humans are detecting MHC signals through smelly T-shirt experiments. In these smelly T-shirt studies men and women select the shirts that smell the best (or the least offensive). It turns out that women prefer the smell of shirts worn by men who have most different MHC profiles than themselves. However, when they are pregnant or on birth control pills (which mimics the hormones of pregnancy), they prefer the smell of men who are most similar to themselves. Perhaps this is because women are adapted to spend time with their kin while pregnant, and spend time looking for mates with novel phenotypes when not pregnant. For this reason, I suggest that women beware of the effects of birth control pills on your choice of mate! Try a non-hormonal method of birth control before getting too serious.

Countess

...counting burners with the Black Rock Census and documenting burner culture for the history books

Countess wrote:We are actually very stinky apes. Other animals have a stronger sense of smell, but since we don't have this skill, we produce a lot of odor so that we can communicate information through olfaction.

Especially after a week on the Playa........

TITWI

To be on the wire is life. The rest is waiting.
It's show time, folks.....Joe Gideon

With all respect to antropologists...
Human evolution is interesting but it is also but a tiny bit of the evolutionary puzzle.

To answer/clarify a few issues:

ugly Dougly: you went extinct. Genetic evidence is fairly compelling. Sorry to be the one to inform you.

Evolution is an odd process. It does not occur in a systematic way which causes fits when trying to explain the process. Much miss-information circulates.

Once in a great while a trait or characteristic that provides a distinct survival advantage will arrise in a species. The rate that these changes occur seems to vary widely for different species. Some have changed hardly at all over 100 million years. Others see large changes over 100 thousand-ish year intervals multiple times.

Lots of changes occur. Most fail to 'take hold' (lack a survival advantage). Some hang around and become 'characteristics' that may or may not fade out with time or even subsequently change again. Physical, mental, soft or hard parts can be affected. Physical antropologists have been obsessed with brian size for like 100 years. I have no doubt that they regularly write papers titled 'Does size matter?'

One of the big confusions for layfolks is the difference between 'species' and 'sub species'. Darwin's finches are likely sub spcies. They have differing physical characteristics but can viably interbreed. Think 'dog breeds' for a simple example.

When an viable change manifests it tends to happen very quickly. Changes happen very sudenly in the fossil record. The unfortunate thing for Darwin was that many of the animals he studied carried selective changes that were caused by environment (dogs are selectively controled by humans as opposed to environment - for example). These types of changes are gradual and additive. Major evolutionary changes seems to take hold suddenly and without much warning. Species of trilobites, for example, do not slowly morph from one to another. Rather, new species suddenly appear in the fossil record. Sudden changes tend to be followed by longer periods of stability. The rate of change and the length of stable periods is not predictable.

This process is called punctuated equilibrium. (Read Gould - he's a God - may his star burn bright).

There are a few examples of gradual change in the fossil record but they are rare compared to evidence of punctuation.

The fossil record shows times when species were popping up fast (called radiations) and times when things were boring and times when mass extinctions occured. Average rates of speciation and extinction can be calculated but are rather fuzzy. Mostly because they do not occur at even rates. They are 'lumpy' (radiations and mass extinctions). Read Raup and Stanley - if I remember correctly.

Much confusion is caused by anthropologists and biologists that love to call every small variation a new species (splitters). The opposite are 'lumpers' that tend to hold that many varied critters are actually members of the same species. Common examples include the discovery that numbers of 'species' are actually various growth stages of the same animal. This is a hitoric problem with trilobite classification. Another instructive example (again) is dogs. Know that Chihuahuas and Great Danes can viably interbreed. They are the same species. Now you realize that a great range of physical variability can exist within a species. This is probably the case with human ancestors as well. Now extend the logic to other characterisicts...

Any book recommendations for the lay person in re: stinky t-shirt-like studies? If not, you should consider writing one -- your examples and prose really sing and I, for one, love when this stuff is boiled down into real world scenarios (i.e. don't chose a mate while you're on hormonal birth control.)

Any book recommendations for the lay person in re: stinky t-shirt-like studies? If not, you should consider writing one -- your examples and prose really sing and I, for one, love when this stuff is boiled down into real world scenarios (i.e. don't chose a mate while you're on hormonal birth control.)

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation is an interesting book about the evolutionary biology of sex. Although it did not help me figure out how I could have offspring, it does talk about these very same stinky t-shirt studies. She theorizes that because so many are on the pill when they meet a man, there have arisen more problems with infertile couples who are not infertile independently. It's not until she goes off the pill that they realize something is wrong. Apparently if a woman tries to have sex with someone who is genetically incompatible, she's more likely to miscarry. The couple is not infertile - if they try with others, they'll get pregnant, just not together.

Basically, anyone with any part red hair genes had a Neanderthal great great^400 grandmother with the mental age of a 2 1/2 year old who was raped by the respective great X grandfather who happened to be an early effort at a homo sapien.

Basically, anyone with any part red hair genes had a Neanderthal great great^400 grandmother with the mental age of a 2 1/2 year old who was raped by the respective great X grandfather who happened to be an early effort at a homo sapien.